The Universal Fire is Jeffrey Foucault’s first album of original material since 2018’s Blood Brothers. The Western Massachusetts-based singer-songwriter describes the album as a working wake to his longtime drummer and best friend Billy Conway, who passed away in December 2021. Before he teamed up with Foucault, Conway had made his mark in the music world as the drummer for Treat Her Right and Morphine.
The album sets Conway’s death against the massive 2008 fire at the Universal Studios lot in California that destroyed the master recordings of many legendary American rock and jazz artists; he uses this event as a backdrop to further explore questions around life and loss.
This sounds rather heavy, but some songs here are downright rockers. Focault is a gifted poetic writer who refuses to wallow in sadness and ponders topics like mortality and legacy. The album, a blend of Americana, rock, and folk, was recorded in one room, produced by Mike Lewis (Bon Iver), and augmented by Foucault’s incredible band: Eric Heywood on pedal steel, Jeremy Moses Curtis on bass, John Convertino (Calexico) on drums, and Erik Koskinen on guitar.
Foucault and his band will be touring the country for the remainder of the year. Catch them if you can. Before he took to the road, Glide had a chance to catch up with Foucault and talk about the album, his friendship with him, and his dealing with the loss of Billy Conway.
The second single off the album is “Solo Modelo” an uptempo song about touring alone. Was “Solo Modelo” the first song you wrote for what would eventually become “The Universal Fire?”
I think it may have been. Pieces of the other songs had been kicking around prior — I have a tendency to write one verse and then spend a decade wondering what it means — but I wrote ‘Solo Modelo’ all at once, when I was on the road alone for the first time in a decade, after Billy Conway got sick. It was like a postcard, and I played it for him at some point, at a soundcheck or something, when he was better for a while. It’s such a simple rhyme scheme, with almost a nursery rhyme sensibility, and it’s jaunty and fun to play, but it was heavy to write.
In January of 2023, you and a group of some of Billy’s musical collaborators/friends released “Further In: The Songs of Billy Conway,” a collection of songs he had written that you all recorded. Were you working on this album before or after you worked on the album of Billy’s songs?
I write all the time, so I wrote some of this record and a bunch of other songs, too, by the time we made ‘Further In.” Between Billy getting sick and the pandemic, I had not been able to make a new record for four years, so songs were piling up and I had maybe forty-five ready to go. We cut twenty-five in the studio and kept ten on the album. I like a ten-song album.
When you started work on this album, did you know it would be, as you say, a working wake for Billy, or did you start writing and then realize that this was the direction it would take? Did the making of “The Universal Fire,” help you grieve the loss of Billy?
The answer to the second question is yes. In most aboriginal cultures, when they grieve someone, they might cut off all their hair, or cut themselves; they do something physical, something outward that can only be healed by time, as a physical sign of the process. We don’t have those forms anymore. We don’t wear black for a year, that sort of thing. Making art was the way I could engage with the loss of my friend, keep him around, and consider what he taught me. I paint a lot and I probably did five portraits of him in a year. That was a similar method.
To answer the first question, I didn’t feel like I had much choice. I knew it would be an a session-as-wake. I knew we all loved Bill and whatever I wrote and whatever we made, would always be a reaction to his absence.
The 2008 fire at Universal Studios and the loss of so many master recordings obviously touched you deeply. Is it something you’ve thought about a lot over the years, or did Billy’s death get you to think about it again?
I didn’t know about the fire at the time or until years later. Our daughter was born in 2008 and I wasn’t reading the news much. When I did finally read about the fire it was a thoughtful moment, and made me wonder about artifacts, legacy, and what it means to lose something. Individually, we all lose everything every go-around through the world. But a culture is made of stories and it felt to me like some part of the story I grew up on had vanished. It felt like a metaphor, but for what?
Every song on the album approaches the idea of loss from a different angle, a different story or point of view, and the overall context is Billy’s death. With the Universal Fire, I liked the reference but I also liked the music of the language. the question in it. I wasn’t interested in making a statement about all those master recordings burning up, even though that music determined the course of my life.
The truth is, in the long time, everyone and everything we know has passed away, and no one will be thinking much about Chuck Berry or Willie Mae Thornton in a hundred or two hundred years. Nothing but the earth lasts, and it begs the question, what does it mean to lose things? To lose what you care most for? to lose anything? Questions are more interesting than answers.
The album opens on a rather quiet, somber note with a song called “Winter Count.” What exactly is a winter count?
A Winter Count is what the plains tribes called the history of a year. When they were in deep winter and holed up, they made a pictograph of the year’s main events painted onto a hide, and these were rolled up and carried along as a kind of history.
Billy and I had talked about making a record just the two of us when he was sick and in the first rounds of chemo and radiation that first long winter, and we were going to call it ‘Winter Count.’ But he got too sick to be able to do it, so that song is a nod to that time. I’d flown into Minnesota and was driving down to the Driftless, the region where IA, IL, WI, and MN come together and the Mississippi River cuts through, one of the only stretches of land untouched by glaciers in the last ice age, with the greatest concentration of cold-water streams in the world. I passed the road for Owatonna, MN., where Billy spent his late childhood, and I started picking up that song like radio traffic, wrote it all out in my lap in a short time.
How difficult was it to get used to working with another drummer?
You know, I’ve been so lucky. I thought it would be hard, but fate intervened. I had met John Convertino – who plays on the new record – years ago on the road when I was opening for Tift Merritt and he was in her band, but I’d been a fan of his for many years since the ’90s, and John’s work with Giant Sand, Calexico, and Richard Buckner. He was my first call, and he was able to do it, and he was perfect, the only drummer who could have done what he did, the way he did it.
John hears the beat where Billy did, and the way I do and feel is no small thing! Ask thirty drummers to play to a click-track and graph their drum hits against the waveform of the click, and there will be a bell curve distribution of what they play, some playing ahead, some behind, some very straight. There were times in the studio when John played so uncannily, similar to what Billy would do, that I almost couldn’t tell them apart. It felt so right to have John in the band, and I knew we were making a record that Billy would have loved, and he was helping us along.
You have such a great band, and I love it when you rock out on tunes like “Nightshift.” When was the last time you toured with a full band, and have you ever toured with this many musicians?
It’s a great band, right? In 2018, when Blood Brothers came out, we toured full band across the USA and Europe. Then, the spring after Billy died, we convened without drums and played in the Missing Man Formation as a quartet across the Midwest, with Erik Koskinen joining the band on lead guitar. On that tour, we left a chair and a shot of tequila on stage for Billy every night.
But this is a real special band, this five-piece, and the songs are built around the interplay between Eric Heywood on steel and Erik Koskinen on guitar, with John and Moses locked up on rhythm. It’s like a really fast car, incredibly agile, and most of the time I’m just hydroplaning. I don’t tell people what to play, and we’re improvising every night. It’s also the largest footprint I’ve ever tried to move around the country, so I’ll probably go broke, but it’ll be worth it.
I know you’ve worked with some of these musicians for a long time, and you seem to view them as more than just your backing musicians. I see that you even put all their names on the album cover, is this why?
Yes! A lot of times music fans will pay attention to the singer without thinking much about the rest of the band or knowing their names. But these guys are all top-shelf players, famous in their rights and world-traveled, all of them impossibly accomplished on their instruments. They’re my band, but mainly they’re my dear friends and my family. Billy used to say that people go into music for all kinds of reasons — for attention, or adventure, to communicate, or to get laid, or whatever — but in the end, the richness of a life in music is the long friendships you have with people all over the country and the world, the dear friends you make.
